Charm Page 13

  Dean Martin’s charm resided in good part in his detachment. He was thought to be a member in good standing in what was known as the Clan or the Rat Pack. In fact, he was contemptuous of Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, and the rest of them. He was good to his parents. He had three marriages and fathered seven children, but his second wife, Jeannie, the wife of longest duration, said that he wasn’t someone who revealed his thoughts to anyone. His son, Dean Jr., said that he didn’t really know his father very well. Apparently nobody did.

  One of Martin’s standby schticks was playing the amiable drunk. On a talk show he once said that he woke that very morning with so bad a hangover that his hair hurt. Before long his playing at being a drunk became a reality. He was also addicted to the painkiller Percodan, which he washed down with Scotch. As the national psyche became infused with political correctness, which he never for a moment recognized as worthy of his attention, he began to be reviled, at least in the press, for his tastelessness. He did a telethon for the City of Hope, causing the columnist Dorothy Kilgallen to ask, “Is leukemia an excuse for vulgarity?” Once admired for his casualness, the Los Angeles Times called him “the world’s laziest superstar,” and Variety added that he worked “in living ennui, [presenting] a better caricature of himself than any other impressionist.” The old jokes about drinking and female anatomy and homosexuals no longer rang the gong of audience approval, and Dean Martin began to be chalked off as “tasteless.” The finishing touch was when, in 1973, he married a woman thirty years younger than he. All these elements served to reduce what was once charming vulgarity to simple vulgarity, tout court. Dean Martin ended his life golfing, watching Westerns on television, getting slowly plastered daily, and awaiting death, which arrived in 1995—“Hiya, pallie”—when he was seventy-eight.

  Charm, like cashmere, can wear thin.

  Chapter X

  Gay Charmers

  Charm, as I hope I have established, comes in many varieties: There are English, French, and Italian charmers; rogue charmers; female charmers; vulgar charmers; and doubtless many others, including, I would say, gay charmers. By this I do not mean merely gay men and lesbian women who also happen to be charming. What I mean is there is something about being gay or lesbian that, properly deployed, can confer a certain point of view and manner of confronting the world that is, or at least often can be in imaginative people, distinct and discretely different from other varieties of charm—a category of charm informed by a point of view conferred by the experience of being gay.

  Somerset Maugham, who was himself gay, in an essay on El Greco in Don Fernando, his book on Spain, wrote of the gay man: “He stands on the bank, aloof and ironical, and watches the river of life flow on.” This is of course less so today, when the acceptance of homosexuality is greatly increased, so that gay men and lesbian women now marry and raise families, and are often enough fully and rightly in the flow of life. Yet there is still, I believe, a homosexual outlook that provides its own kind of charm.

  Until fairly recently, then, when strong prejudice against homosexuality was regnant, the gay man or lesbian woman was simultaneously inside and yet not completely of society. In many countries, and in several American states, homosexuality was illegal, an offense punished by imprisonment. This lent an outsider status to gay men, less so to lesbian women. In sophisticated circles, usually artistic ones, homosexuality generally caused no social difficulties, and the roster of homosexual artists has always been impressive. In the past century it has included such figures as Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, E. M. Forster, Andre Gide, Somerset Maugham, Genet, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, and many others. The earlier roster of homosexual artists, stretching from Michelangelo to Marcel Proust, is more impressive still. Even within artistic circles people could use another person’s homosexuality against him or her in cruel ways—consider Ernest Hemingway’s treatment of Gertrude Stein’s lesbianism in A Moveable Feast—but among artists at least for the most part homosexuality found acceptance. Elsewhere things were trickier, and sometimes perilous. As recently as 1953, the great English actor John Gielgud was arrested for “importuning for immoral purposes”—in plainer language, for propositioning a man in a public restroom—and luckily escaped prison.

  This sense of outsiderishness, tinged with genuine danger, gave gay and lesbian women imbued with wit a certain edge. If one were homosexual, one was like everyone else, but with a not insignificant difference—a difference still not adequately defined by scientific inquiry. Much talk and writing exists about the links—genetic, psychological, social-scientific—between homosexuality and artistic creativity, none of it scientifically confirmed. But what seems unarguable is that homosexuality has consequences on the ways in which one views the world—warily, sometimes skeptically, or, as Maugham suggests, detached and ironically. Because of this, gay men and lesbian women were endowed with a sensibility of a kind unavailable to others. This sensibility often issues in what I think of as gay charm.

  Such charm, as with heterosexual charm, comes in various modes and styles. One thinks of Fran Lebowitz, who makes no bones about her lesbianism and who has said many charming and also a few penetrating things. On noting so many older children still being pushed in strollers, she remarked, “The person will make a fortune who invents the first shaving mirror for strollers.” She has said that the reason for the paucity of her own writing is that she suffers from no mere writer’s block but from a writer’s blockade. She declared that she thought of her lesbianism as a badge of freedom—from the constraints, one gathers, of raising a family and participating in all the boring rituals that follow therefrom—and claimed now to be astonished to discover that the gay liberation movement is eager to have its adherents enrolled in two of the most constraining institutions in the land: marriage and the right to serve in the military.

  In the view of some, Gore Vidal was thought to have been charming. Vidal could be witty, but his wasn’t an amused but an angry wit. The form it chiefly took was the put-down. He is probably more famous for his dustups with William F. Buckley Jr., Norman Mailer, and Truman Capote than for anything he wrote. Vidal’s was the pose of the patrician, based, rather flimsily, on having an ancestor who was a senator from Tennessee. His persistent attacks on the United States suggested that the country had somehow let him down, wasn’t good enough for him. So, too, had contemporary literature, both in its creation and its criticism, though when he said disparaging things about either, one sensed that behind this was the failure of the literary establishment to recognize him as a great novelist, which, inconveniently enough, he wasn’t. “I never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television,” was one of his better-known mots. Another has it that “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail,” which reads like La Rochefoucauld without the elegance.

  Vidal was not amused by life, and, one felt, ticked off by not being allowed all the way inside, perhaps as a U.S. senator himself. (In 1960 he ran for Congress from New York’s 29th congressional district and lost.) During his lawsuit against Truman Capote for slander for alleging that he, Vidal, was drunk and insulting during a visit to the Kennedy White House, Lee Radziwill, Jaqueline Kennedy’s sister, refused to testify on Capote’s behalf. Radziwill later said to the gossip columnist Liz Smith, “Oh, Liz, what do we care, they’re just a couple of fags. They’re disgusting.” Whether the remark ever got back to Vidal is not known, but had it done so it would have reassured him that his sexuality had kept him permanently an outsider. The remark doesn’t do much either to enhance the nobility of Princess Radziwill.

  “I am exactly as I appear,” Gore Vidal wrote. “There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you will find cold water.” He may well have been right.

  Truman Capote was less charming than arresting. He got one’s attention by saying outlandish things, usually in public places. On The Johnny Carson Show he s
aid the popular novelist Jackie Collins looked like nothing so much as “a truck driver in drag.” Another time he called the novels of James Baldwin, by then dead and something of a sacred figure, not to be criticized, “balls-achingly boring.” Capote must have expended considerable charm upon Babe Paley, Slim Keith, and other of the wealthy, fashionable women of Manhattan, the so-called “ladies who lunch,” to win them over, but blew all the social capital he built up doing so when he published a portion of a never-to-be-completed novel based on them in Esquire. Charm will take one only so far, but in Truman Capote’s case, not past serious indiscretions.

  In modern times, gay charm first shows up in a major way in the works and even more in the personality—perhaps persona is the more precise word here—of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). Wilde’s distinctly gay charm showed up well before it was known that Wilde himself was gay; or perhaps it is more accurate to say one recognizes it unmistakably in the hindsight of his famous scandal. Had it not been for Wilde’s litigation with the Marquis of Queensberry, whose son, Lord Alfred Douglas, was Wilde’s lover, Oscar Wilde might never, at least in his lifetime, have been outed in one of the most famous trials of all time. Wilde sued the Marquis of Queensberry, for libel, after the latter left a card at the playwright’s club that read, “For Oscar Wilde, posing sodomite.” When it became clear in mid-trial that he was not going to win his case, Wilde dropped his suit, allowing the state to prosecute him. When it did so, in 1895, it found him guilty of “gross indecency” and sentenced him to two years imprisonment in Reading Gaol, from which he emerged a bankrupt and broken man, in which condition he died in Paris three years later at the age of forty-six.

  Had Oscar Wilde not been outed in this sad way, would one today think of his writings as the product of a sensibility exhibiting, to a very high power, gay charm? He was a great showman, a self-promoter, posing for photographers in a green suit and cape holding a single lily (“One can never be overdressed or overeducated,” he said). The form that gay charm takes in Wilde, both in his plays and in his conversation, is a sharp eye for seeing through social hypocrisy and a love of paradox.

  Along with George Bernard Shaw, H. L. Mencken, and Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde is among the most quoted of modern writers; he is, one suspects, more quoted, certainly more quotable, than any of these other writers. The brilliance of his formulations is what makes his most much anthologized quotations memorable. Dorothy Parker attested to this when, in a bit of light verse, she wrote: “If, with the literate, I am/Impelled to try an epigram,/I never seek to take the credit;/We all assume that Oscar said it.”

  Most of Oscar Wilde’s most famous remarks are attacks on received opinions and conventional wisdom, strained through what I have been calling a gay sensibility. “Anyone who lives within his means suffers a lack of imagination,” is one such example. “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal” is another. “True friends stab you in the front” is a nice reversal on enemies stabbing you in the back, and “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much” is a nice play off the central Christian doctrine of forgiveness. The great sin for Wilde—no surprise here—is to be boring. He held that “there is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

  Not being talked about was not usually Oscar Wilde’s problem. He saw to that by his calculatedly outrageous behavior, though he was not everywhere esteemed. A surprising contemner of Wilde was Noël Coward, who himself exhibited gay charm to a very high power. The references to Wilde in Coward’s diary are uniformly deflationary. “Am reading more of Oscar Wilde,” Coward writes in 1946. “What a tiresome affected sod.” At one point, working on After the Ball, his musical version of Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, Coward notes: “The more Coward we can get into the script and the more Wilde we can eliminate the happier we will be.” Later he writes that

  I have the Oscar Wilde letters and have come to the reluctant conclusion that he was one of the silliest, most conceited and unattractive characters that ever existed . . . It is extraordinary indeed that such a posing, artificial old queen should have written one of the greatest comedies [Lady Windermere’s Fan] in the English language. In my opinion it is the only thing of the least importance that he did write.

  Noël Coward never expressed the least regret about his own homosexuality. Nor did he publicize it. He never mentions it in his published autobiographies, and he asked his official biographer not to mention it. The best defensive is strong offense, and Noël Coward’s entire life may be said to have been a charm offensive. When late in life he was asked how he wished to be remembered, he answered, “By my charm.” Charm for him meant being at all times interesting and amusing. “There’s only one thing worse than being a dwarf,” he said, “and that’s being a boring dwarf.” During a health campaign for slimness, he remarked that he’d “rather be fat than disgruntled,” though he was never other than elegantly slender and generally cheerful. When he sounded the note of pessimism, he did so optimistically. His put-downs were never less than amusing. “Dear Randolph,” he said of Winston Churchill’s son, “so unspoiled by his great failure.”

  The theater critic Kenneth Tynan called Noël Coward “one of the brightest stars in the homosexual constellation that did so much to enliven the theatre between the wars.” Tynan goes on to remark that Coward “invented the concept of cool . . . and made camp elegant. A master of understatement, he could make passion seem crude.” Writing about Coward in 1973, the year of his death, Tynan claimed that “in fact his best work has not dated, by which I mean his most ephemeral.”

  Coward’s charm turned up in his work and life both. The story is told of the five-year-old child of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, upon noting a male dog sniffing a female dog, asking what the animals were doing, and Coward responding: “The doggie in front has suddenly gone blind, and the one behind has very kindly offered to push him all the way to Dunstan Station.” On another occasion, wearing a business, or lounge, suit, he walked into a party where every other man in the room was in white tie and tails. “Please,” he announced, “no one need apologize for being overdressed.”

  Noël Coward was born in 1899 into that English no-man’s-land known as the lower middle class. His father sold pianos. His mother, a stronger influence on him than his father, early sought a career in the theater for him. Public school and university were not in the cards for Noël, and he later averred that they “would probably have set me back years.” The theater critic John Lahr suggests that Coward’s charm covered his vulnerabilities, and being relatively low-born in highly class-conscious England may have been among them. If so, it was not for long, and vulnerable was the last thing anyone would have thought Noël Coward.

  At the age of twenty-four, after a number of plays produced but indifferently received, he wrote, directed, and acted in The Vortex, a play about nymphomania and drug addiction, which was an enormous success and which in one stroke made him a coming man. At one point he had four plays staged simultaneously in London. “I was a highly publicized and irritatingly successful figure much in demand,” he later wrote, [though] “the critical laurels that had been so confidently predicted for me in my twenties never graced my brow, and I was forced to console myself with the bitter palliative of box-office success. Which I enjoyed very much indeed.”

  Those last two sentences standing alone could serve as an exercise in irony-laced charm of the kind that was Coward’s specialty. They also provide a mini-perspective on his view of the world: his disdain for the darkly high-brow in art, his pleasure at popular success, his playing at the sophisticate-cynic who believed there was no greater sin than being boring in public. “Subtlety, discretion, restraint, finesse, charm, elegance, good manners, talent, and glamour still enchant me,” he wrote in his sixty-second year.

  Coward quickly established in the public mind a self-portrait—very nearly a caricature—of hi
mself as the man in the silken dressing gown, cigarette in long ivory holder, casually puffing out smoke and witticisms. As for his homosexuality, he never mentioned, let alone emphasized, it, for he felt to do so was boorish in the extreme, and anyhow he assumed everyone knew about it, apart perhaps, as he once noted, “a few old ladies in Worthing who don’t know.” Public acknowledgment of his sexual preference came only posthumously, when his diaries and a biography were published by his companion Graham Payn.

  Noël Coward’s charm in good part derived from his having found the world a continuously amusing place. This gave him a balance that served him well even in failure. He loathed gloom in others, and did not permit it for any length of time in himself. “How needlessly unhappy people make themselves and each other,” he wrote. The titles of some of his own songs nicely reflect his bouncy pessimism: “Bad Times Just Around the Corner,” “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Hun,” “I Wonder What Happened to Him” [About Englishmen cashiered out of the English Army in India for sexual high-jinx of one sort or another], “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage,” “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” “Uncle Harry,” “Why Do the Wrong People Travel,” and others. These play in charming contrast to his songs of romance and of melancholy: “Sail Away,” “I Wanted to Show You Paris,” “This Is a Night for Lovers,” and others, which do not hold up quite so well.

  Common sense was a keynote in Noël Coward. Asked of his spiritual philosophy by a childhood friend, he had earlier written: “My philosophy is as simple as ever. I love smoking, drinking, moderate sexual intercourse on a diminishing scale, reading and writing (not arithmetic). I have a selfless absorption in the well-being of Noël Coward.” Later he would give up drinking, noting, “I don’t need it, I don’t particularly like it, it makes me feel dull and heavy . . . it is fattening and boring, and so no more of it.” Unlike Somerset Maugham, W. H. Auden, and other homosexual artists hostage to wretched lovers, he seemed to have had this aspect of his life well managed: “To me passionate love has always been like a tight shoe rubbing blisters on my Achilles heel.” In his public so in his private life he never seemed other than in splendid control.